Houseboats

A houseboat (different from boathouse, which is a shed for storing boats) is a boat that has been designed or modified to be used primarily as a home. Some houseboats are not motorized, because they are usually moored, kept stationary at a fixed point and often tethered to land to provide utilities. However, many are capable of operation under their own power. Float house is a Canadian and American term for a house on a float (raft), a rough house may be called a shanty boat. In Western countries, houseboats tend to be either owned privately or rented out to holiday-goers, and on some canals in Europe, people dwell in houseboats all year round. Examples of this include, but are not limited to, Amsterdam, London, and Paris.

In Zimbabwe, specifically on Lake Kariba, houseboats have been in use since the creation of the lake in the late 1950s/early 1960s. A houseboat makes it easy to experience the Zambezi basin and all the associated wildlife, as a lot of game come down to the water for drinking and to cool down.

There is a houseboat and fishing community on the southern side of Hong Kong Island known as Aberdeen floating village. There was also one such community in the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter.

In India, houseboats as accommodation for tourists are common on the backwaters of Kerala, see below, and on the Dal Lake near Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir.

Houseboats in Kerala, south India, are huge, slow-moving barges used for leisure trips. They are a reworked model of Kettuvallams (in the Malayalam language, Kettu means "tied with ropes", and vallam means "boat"), which, in earlier times, were used to carry rice and spices from Kuttanad to the Kochi port. Kerala houseboats were considered a convenient means of transportation.

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